


A Day Is Long

by ophellos



Series: Love is a Shadow [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Character Study, F/M, Internalized Homophobia, John Winchester's A+ Parenting, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Pining, Pre-Season/Series 06, Unrequited Love, brief mention of alcohol withdrawal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-10
Updated: 2017-04-10
Packaged: 2018-10-15 04:18:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10549942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ophellos/pseuds/ophellos
Summary: Dean stares down and feels it, an empty space in his chest, and heaviness in his limps. He’s no stranger to the feeling; he’s spent a long time lying awake in bed with Lisa snoring softly tucked under his arm, missing his brother more than anything he’s ever felt. The grief isn’t new. It’s an ever present feeling in his bones that drowns him when he’s not throwing himself headfirst into perfecting his burgers or fixing the stiff back door of their house, or burying himself in Lisa.The longing is new though. Of course he wants Sam alive, wants to see his face again, wants to hug Sam to him and never let him go, but as Dean stands above the burning burgers, he feels the longing for Cas in his chest, in his hands, in his lips.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place in the year Dean spends with Lisa in between season 5 and 6.
> 
> Title comes from the Pablo Neruda poem "Don't Go Far Off" which is just gorgeous.
> 
> Warnings for internalized homophobia and a shit ton of guilt that comes with that, alcoholism and withdrawal, and mentions of John's abuse.

It’s about six weeks before Dean starts to feel the itch. Coincidentally, traitorously, it’s around this time that he first is able to climb out of bed most days and actually act like a functional human being.

Well, as functional as he’s ever been. He’s given up hunting, turned his back on the entire hunting world but it’s not so easy to escape the habits he’s built up over his life. He’s been drinking since he was thirteen—a beer handed to him by his father a month after his birthday when he finally mentioned that John missed it. Alcohol is a constant that he’s always known.

There’s too many things in his life that he needs to forget and he’s spent too many years being unable to sleep without it that when he tries, he lays awake until dawn, shaking and sweating and seeing things in the corner of his vision, and then he gulps down several shots worth in the master bathroom and passes out in bed for the rest of the morning. Dean has always downplayed it but even then, sitting on the floor of the bathroom with a bottle of whiskey beside him and reminded of his own father, he has to admit that maybe he’d been ignoring it for much longer than he should have. Not that knowing he has a problem means he’ll stop. When has that ever been one of his strong suits?

Six weeks is what it takes for him to pull himself (mostly) together and start pulling his weight around Lisa’s house. She’s been patient, and kind, and understanding in the time he’s spent going crazy and Dean almost thinks it’s unfair to both of them that just when he’s starting to come back from the edge, he has to leave.

See, the thing that Dean has both worn as a badge of honor as a teen and then as just another cross to bear as a hunter is that he’s never been in a relationship longer than 2 months. And no, besides the hallucination back in Glenwood Springs Psychiatric Hospital, he’s never told anyone that.

So six weeks into this thing, Dean wakes up and is halfway through a long overdue scrub of Lisa’s oven before he catches a glimpse of the calendar and then spends the rest of the morning packing his things. Lisa is at work and Ben at school. Dean thinks that he can make it to Tennessee before they come home and realize he’s gone. 

He makes it to Louisville, just over the Indiana-Kentucky border, before the adrenaline wears off and the guilt begins to scoop his stomach out with its hooks. He thinks about Lisa and her long dark hair and her dazzling smile and the gentle way she lines her body up with his at night, arms snaking around his tummy and cool minty breath against his neck. He thinks about Ben and the light in his eyes when Dean joins him on the couch for a video game (he loses every time) or a Star Trek marathon (he impresses Ben with the trivia knowledge he’s picked up over the years) and he thinks about the way Ben hugged him goodnight at bedtime just a week ago.

Dean has never thought he would have a family. Hell, he’s surprised every January when he makes it another year older.

And there’s nothing waiting for him in Tennessee or in Kentucky or Kansas or any other state he could run away to. Bobby would send him packing as soon as he realized he left Lisa. Ellen and Jo are gone and there’s no Sam, no Cas. Dean turns around and pulls in the driveway just as Lisa does.

After that he puts the Impala in the garage, whispers an apology that sounds an awful like a goodbye as he covers her with a tarp.

 

The first time Dean feels _it_ , he’s halfway through flipping burgers on the grill. He stands there, patty sitting on the metal spatula, poised to flip, frozen. He had been happily grilling them, excited for Lisa’s girlfriends to taste them; he’s been experimenting with the flavors and spices and he’s convinced that this time they will be perfect. Through the panic, he hears Lisa laugh, tapping a musical number in his heart as always. She’s standing across the yard, at their patio table and speaking with one of her friends. She tries to catch his eyes as he glances over but he drops his eyes back to the grill, convinced that every inch of what he feels is written clearly on his face.

He had flipped one, two, three burgers and on the fourth, the memory of Cas chowing down on a burger fills his mind and before he can stop himself, he wonders what Cas would think of the burgers, if he would be able to tell what flavor was the one Dean was looking for.

The smell of smoke hits his nose and he curses, flipping the burger and then rushing to flip the remaining four, which are blackened and shriveled on the side now facing up.

Dean stares down and feels it, an empty space in his chest, and heaviness in his limps. He’s no stranger to the feeling; he’s spent a long time lying awake in bed with Lisa snoring softly tucked under his arm, missing his brother more than anything he’s ever felt. The grief isn’t new. It’s an ever present feeling in his bones that drowns him when he’s not throwing himself headfirst into perfecting his burgers or fixing the stiff back door of their house, or burying himself in Lisa.

The longing is new though. Of course he wants Sam alive, wants to see his face again, wants to hug Sam to him and never let him go, but as Dean stands above the burning burgers, he feels the longing for Cas in his chest, in his hands, in his lips.

He jumps when he feels a hand slide up his arm but it’s soft, moisturized, manicured—not large or calloused, god what the _fuck_ is wrong with him? Lisa smiles softly up at him, eyebrows pinched slightly. “Are you okay?” she asks and he wants, god he wants—but that’s impossible, and he wants to say no, he wants to let his tears fall into the coals and let the heat sizzle dry like the flaying of his skin in hell. He smiles down at her and presses his lips hard to hers, less of a kiss than a desperate pressure against his mouth, like he can forget how they tingle with desire. He wraps an arm around her slim waist and she hums lightly and kisses him back before pulling away after a second. “I guess that’s a yes,” she says, laughing a little, cheeks flushed as she glances back at her friends. She extracts herself and pats his cheek, returning to the patio and Dean is left wishing his grief could weigh him down through the ground and back to hell or that this desire could dig its claws into his shoulders and drag him to heaven where he would be barred at the golden gates and reprimanded for the sins that grip his heart and then finally, finally he’d be thrown back down to hell and this time he would do better, he would be stronger, he would let himself be taken apart for the rest of eternity.

The burgers are charred and Dean doesn’t taste a goddamn thing.

 

The second time he feels it, Dean is trailing his hands down Lisa’s body and dipping them between her legs, smiling as she gasps into his mouth above him. He’s circling two fingers against her clit and pushing his forehead against hers, staring into her eyes and then he’s back at the pit, pain radiating from every inch of his body and it’s not Lisa pressing against his head, it’s Cas’ fingers, and Dean comes with Lisa’s hand around his cock and the searing memory of Castiel’s healing grace filling his body.

Dean’s head spins and his chest _aches_ as he drops his hand lower and presses his fingers into her, rubbing her with his thumb. Her fingers scramble for grip on his shoulders and her nails dig in and he funnels everything he has into those pinpricks against his shoulder blades, working his fingers in and out of her at a pace that has her falling over the edge quickly after him.

She giggles and gasps as she comes, a trait that made him fall a little bit in love with her back when they first met and his head and heart wasn’t full of another man, an angel. He loves her now and hates himself for yearning for what he can’t have, should never be allowed to have, could never deserve to have.

As they fall asleep that night, her arms around him as she spoons him from behind, lips tracing at half-moon cuts she put on his shoulders, Dean teeters on the edge of sleep, his senses filled with a dream of messy brown hair, five o’clock shadow rubbing against his neck and his hands tangled up in a blue tie.

 

He’s expecting it now. The days and weeks pass and the longing is as much of a part of him as the grief and the guilt for his brother, the love and care he feels for Lisa, the protective, paternal duty he feels for Ben.

Lisa has noticed that something is wrong. It was only a matter of time when he starts to flinch away from her kisses and her attempts to be intimate. He loves her, he loves her but he longs for Cas and every touch burns and reminds him of that. And bless her, she gives him more patience than he deserves.

He’s never told her what happened but he thinks she knows. After those first few days, she hasn’t mentioned Sam. He lets her think that’s the problem, because it is partially.

It comes quicker now that he knows it’s there. Once unlocked, Pandora ’s Box can’t be closed, the sins can’t be forced back in. He pines and he longs and he guilt-trips and he questions his retirement; there’s no one to save, no way to atone.

 

Lisa asks him to come to a funeral for a family friend and Dean is a good partner and a respectable man now so he does. He sits in the pew with a wrinkled suit he dug out of the Impala’s trunk and the slacks bite just too tightly at his hips and he scribbles onto the pamphlet with a pen he stole from a bulletin board at the entrance.

He knew this was a terrible idea when she first asked him. Too many reminders of death and religion and angels and the devil.

He’s acting like a child and he knows it and Lisa stills his hand from where he’s torn through the page with the force of his doodling. And she looks at him with an expression that tells Dean that she can feel him shaking.

He excuses himself to the fancy bathroom and clears his head with the swig of a flask and fingers digging into the flesh of his left shoulder where the skin is too smooth, too bare, too clean.

The first time Dean had showered at Lisa’s house, he had stared into the bathroom mirror and wanted to crack it with a fist because Cas was gone, back to heaven and he was never seeing him again and the bastard had taken his handprint with him. It makes everything feel so much less real and Dean had thought for one brief, wild moment that maybe he’s going nuts, that none of it actually happened, that every touch and glance and smile shared was a delusion of Dean’s desperate, screwed up brain.

And because Dean’s life is one big cosmic joke, there’s an angelic statue perched on the counter of the church bathroom and Dean stares at it, rosy cheeks and soft hands and downturned eyes and fluffy wings and he sweeps it across the counter and cracks it against the wall. He’s seen angels and this kind of bullshit ain’t it. 

It’s not Lisa that knocks on the door eventually but Ben and Dean thinks that might be worse because he lets Lisa see how broken he is but he doesn’t want to put the burden of his own turmoil on Ben like his own father did. He quickly pops a mint and opens the door with a smile and slings an arm around Ben’s shoulders before he remembers that funerals require solemnity, not the reckless, desperate smiles he’s flashing around.

 

Sometimes he goes into the garage and sweeps the tarp off of his car and climbs into the front seat, feeling the ghosts of his previous passengers fill the air. He misses his brother and the lifetime the car has seen. He doesn’t expect the longing to hit him as hard as it does while sitting in the Impala, because Cas didn’t spend nearly as much time with her as Sam did, but it’s there and he feels the loss like a brick to the chest as he looks at the passenger seat and remembers the night that he had confessed to having more fun with Cas than he had with Sam in years.

He thinks maybe that’s when it started, at least when he first was aware of it, standing outside that brothel (and who brings their crush to a brothel—his boundary-fucked and confused ass, that’s who), puffing out gasps of laughter and looking at Castiel and imagining his lips on his and immediately, instinctively knowing to cram it down, repress that shit deeper because _you’re Dean Winchester and he’s a fucking angel_. Dean may have skewed morals and some questionable decisions under his belt, but even he knows it’s a line you don’t cross.

He’s done everything ever asked of him, followed every rule and filled every role his father set out for him, even if fitting himself into that mold had squeezed and compressed and stretched and warped him into a fun-house mirror caricature of himself.

He lets himself feel it in the car though, touches himself through his jeans and imagines what would have happened if he had crossed that line. And when he rips down his fly and pulls himself rough and quick and spills into his hand, it’s Castiel’s name in his lungs, on his tongue, on his lips, in his hands.

He lets himself feel it, hyperventilating and bent over with the pain of it, head pressed against the grip of the steering wheel. He slams his hand down once, twice, and then the tears are coming out.

“Castiel,” he says, hands covering his head and eyes squeezed shut because he might be giving in but maybe if he doesn’t look, he can pretend that Cas doesn’t show up, or that he does. “I—” _miss you, want you, love you_ “—need you. Need your help.”

He doesn’t know how long he sits there. When he finally raises his head, there’s no one there and he doesn’t know if that’s the answer he wanted.

 

There’s nothing more to do but recommit himself. Dean throws himself fully, wholly, absolutely into his life with Lisa. It’s dumb to feel like he’s betrayed her but he feels it nonetheless. Lisa should be enough, she should be everything he ever wanted. She’s the damn picture perfect dream Dean had forced himself to envision for himself when he wasn’t spending his childhood with a gun in his hands and lead in his gut for the way he looked at men.

Dean cleans the house. He cooks and tries recipes and improves recipes and cooks them again. He gets along with Lisa’s friends and mingles with the neighbors. He cuts the grass and rakes the leaves and shovels the driveway. He is the perfect partner, the perfect father and he relegates thoughts about Cas until he’s at least three drinks deep every night. It’s safer that way; he tells himself he can’t control where his mind takes him when he’s drunk. And it always takes him to Cas.


End file.
